The main road leading into town is not paved. It is drained and ditched for winter snow and it has gravel on its surface, but it is rough and rutted, too rough to be inviting, as the residents of this town had intended. There is no directional sign and no road name. The little road comes off US 30 in the heart of Nebraska at a nondescript junction with only a row of mailboxes in evidence. Washboard rattles its course and stones scar its surface. A random traveler coming upon this dreary intersection might stop and follow with their eye the road’s rise and fall to see it disappear over a bare hill and determine not to go that way for it looks too tedious and difficult for casual curiosity.

     But on this warm, still morning beneath a broody sky, two groups passed through this junction with the single intent of going to this place. The first group came through about 9:30 AM in two proper cars with three men in each. They had on white shirts, ties, and coats. The second group, half an hour later, was led by Ornel Flaven walking out in front of his people in his blowsy coveralls, he was followed by Terence, in khaki pants and khaki shirt buttoned up to his neck, pushing a rubber-tired wheelbarrow which bore a wooden cross on its bow. Behind him, five travel-worn men carrying packs and bedrolls walked. There then came a haggard, brown car with cardboard boxes lashed to its top, driven by a woman carrying more people in the back and towing another car with twisted bed sheets used as a tow rope. The second car in tow was steered by a man in field clothes. Behind them followed five ragged walkers of various ages and dress. Then came a VW Microbus with four more people inside. At the rear of the muster, a clutch of tattered children skipped along. The troupe moved forward in an orderly manner. There were three old cars, a wheelbarrow and twenty-two travelers, raising a large plume of dust behind them.

     This uncertain little road is six miles long and terminates at the prairie town of Applewhite. It took this flock two and a half hours to walk. Ornel Flaven, out in front, could have walked twice the distance traveled this morning and Terence, with his wheelbarrow, thrice. But they held back for the unity of their newly formed community. The sky was darkening, the air was still and implacable. A mile from town, the dogs started barking.  

     Dogs don’t like uniforms or persons unkempt. They don’t like strangers entering their province, and they don’t like oddities. In addition, the dogs of Applewhite, like their masters, were suspicious of all comers. They still chased cars and tried to bite their tires. When this ragged procession entered the vicinity of Applewhite, the dogs knew something was very wrong, long before it hove into view. They raised sleeping heads from their paws to cock ears in a distant direction. They came out from under front porches, sofa beds, back yards, dog houses and kitchen tables. They broke free and raced through the streets out into the country road to confront that which they were sure was coming. And they weren’t disappointed. The pack stopped in the middle of the road a half a mile from Applewhite’s last house to size up the aggregate heading toward them, for they had never seen anything to match it and knew it was an awful thing. Now the barking began anew, the yaps, deep woofs, and howls rent the still of the morning. But the creature in the middle of the road kept moving threateningly toward them. Fear now mixed with outrage, it seemed to take no heed of them, so the dogs did the next best thing and fell into stride with it, barking out their indignity as loud as possible as they, and it, approached the town.

     The town of Applewhite would be a surprise to anyone. At the end of this long stony road, one would expect to find a rather cheerless and maybe forgotten accumulation of dingy homesteads appropriate to the open prairie. Instead, over the last rise, a wooded green community is suddenly revealed, nestled in a shallow valley with red tile roofs peeping through the foliage of the great trees. A broad avenue and winding lanes connect delicately built cottages of beautiful proportion, somewhat resembling an antebellum style. The country road connects directly into the broad Avenue of  Commerce with brownstone buildings of two and three stories. The accidental discovery of this town, out here on the open prairie, is a shock seldom found because it has so few visitors.

     As one draws nearer, however, it becomes clear that all is not just as it appears at a greater distance. Most of the commercial buildings are vacant and ill kept and the carefully laid cobbles of the main street are beginning to be overrun with weeds pushing up between them.
Hard times appear to have befallen Applewhite.

       *******************************

     In the late eighteen hundreds, Albert Applewhite wanted to build a beautiful town more than anything else. The very young Albert laid out his plans carefully in his head each night before he went to sleep. He worked out just how he would go about his life’s project. He told no one of his scheme for fear of seeming too grave for a ten year old boy, though he knew that it would happen without question, just as he had planned. As he grew, Albert developed some very definite ideas about how a human might approach life on earth. These carefully conceived notions would be put into practice by incorporating them in the community of this town. The rest of mankind would follow.

     His plans stretched over his lifetime and had to accommodate all the details necessary to bring it to fruition.

     Albert’s family was of modest means, so in order to accomplish his objectives he needed to make a tidy fortune, in liquid assets. Albert was confident he would succeed at most any profession he chose, so he considered them all. If he were to become a shipping magnate then he would have plenty of vessels at his disposal, or as a lumber tycoon he would have a lot of wood products. But it was money that he needed, cash, so he set his sights upon the world of money, that he might produce surpluses in cash. When he was of college age, and very big for an eighteen year old, he told his father, who had always been a little overwhelmed and edgy about his overbearing son, that he wanted to study finance. His father thought it was a splendid idea. Off you go.

     Of course, Albert did well in school.  
     Albert’s family lived in upstate New York and when he finished his schooling, at an established eastern academy, he returned to his rural hometown of Horseheads to open its first bank. This, he decided, was a good starting point for a man with no money but a lot of talent, family, and ambition. The bank did well from the beginning and Albert came to be known as a fair and even handed banker. His bank soon was the best in the county. At twenty-five, Albert married his soft-spoken childhood friend, Belle.

   
     Time passed on by and Albert matured and grew. He became a very large man, large of body and large of person. He wore a size thirteen shoe and bent to enter his front door. He talked of wonderful things, with his hands filling the air describing volumes of tangible ideas, that without doubt would come to pass when blessed with his energy and confidence. Children would gather about his chair to absorb his glee. He would make everything seem fun. Albert loved to play children’s games with them, he would be the Indian Chief and pass his cigar around for them to gag on, their mothers rolled their eyes, but did not intervene. During the lean years, he took in the homeless and gave them garages for their quarters. One morning on the way to work, he found an abandoned child playing in the street mud, not an unusual occurrence during these hard times. He took the forsaken child home and housed her and educated her. At a time when it was little approved, he fully believed in a woman’s education.

     In return for his attention and favor, he asked for absolute loyalty and devotion. Should the trust be broken by a colleague or friend, for whatever reason, the gracious warmth was withdrawn instantly. For their own peace of mind, those who worked for him followed his rules of commitment and constantly sought his blessing. He had an uncanny ability to make others want to do all they could for him. Those who were in disfavor found life very hard. Those who were on the outside were condemned to remain there forever, there was no second chance.

     Albert was handsome, fastidious and a careful dresser as was his wife Belle. Their house was large and noble and very beautiful. Albert believed that the need for beauty was fundamental to the human soul. By the time he was forty five, Albert had amassed the capital needed to launch his plans.

     One day, in the spring of 1889, he told his wife he was going to close the bank, sell his assets and move to the West to found a town, and she and the children could come with him now or later. They were inclined to stay until he had established his town, and this was good with Albert, for he believed in the freedom of women and children. Albert left her with a generous sum and set about preparing for his trip.  

     Albert believed good things can only be done in beautiful places, and one must have beauty in one’s life to be good. Goodness was second only to beauty. Both must be pursued relentlessly.
Horseheads was adequate for most of the town people, but not for Albert. It was acceptable visually, as were most towns, but far from beautiful. His town would delight the aesthetic senses and provide a constant reserve of inspiration. Albert did not believe that beauty could simply happen. It had to be planned and nurtured.  It had to be built. Beauty was there in amplitude but it took skill to realize it. Haphazard augmentation was dangerous and ugly.  

     Albert had set an ambitious goal for himself and was very keen to get to it. On a glorious April morning, with an uncharacteristic lack of display, Albert set out on a deeply rutted road, the only road that led northwest out of Horseheads. He had reduced his possessions to exclude all but those necessities that would fit easily in a small trap wagon behind one horse. Albert was an accomplished marksman, one of his necessities was a high powered rifle, he was confident that he could use it effectively, so he had little to fear. He had just the slightest notion of where he was heading, other than west. But he was quite sure that he would know the place when he found it.

     His journey was to be fourteen hundred miles through cow fields and pasture gates and mired trails. Proper gravel roads were still rare and roads paved with macadam were only in a few cities and almost no towns. Albert was impressed by Buffalo, the first city in North America to be paved. He braved late winter snow and smelly accommodations, and muck so deep that his horse would refuse to continue with his legs lost in the mud up to his traces.  

     From November to June, the towns of the Midwest were afloat on a vast sea of ice, snow, and mud. Their isolation from the outside world was near total in the spring thaw. The roads of the Midwest plains were troughs of brown, yellow and red stew. Though almost impassable, they were the only connection the marooned towns had to the rest of their society.    

     Albert skirted Cleveland and Chicago, intent on the open spaces. Illinois and Iowa were to his liking, but Nebraska looked better still. After Grand Island, Albert started looking seriously. At Kearney, he heard of some land for sale northeast of Gothenburg, down the way a day’s trip. Following his directions, Albert left the main road, turning north over gentle hills and descended into a shallow valley of extraordinary beauty and knew instantly he had found his place. Sitting on the seat of his sturdy little trap looking down at the valley he knew beyond doubt that he would buy as much land as was available, and build his town. Not until later, in the land office, did he discover that the valley was at the precise intersection of 100 degrees of longitude west and 41 degrees of latitude north.

     Founding a town was not an uncommon act in the America of the late 1800's. The railroad barons were assiduously stretching steel and hardwood rail ties out across the flat lands of the West. Their eastern promotional offices wanted people to occupy the vacant lands to justify their rail lines and domesticate the vast plains. The railroad towns were laid out by young draftsmen sitting at their desks in the eastern offices arbitrarily placing little circles every ten to twenty miles along the path of the track on their maps without the slightest knowledge of the physical feature of the location. The town’s destiny was predetermined as graceless accumulations of a few flimsy buildings on featureless land. Albert passed through dozens of these and was determined to steer clear of the tracks for his selection. Mayors of existing settlements saw the railroad quite differently. They tried to bribe the rail surveyors into deviations in their paths to put their town on the line, for the line as they saw it was their only hope of survival into the twentieth century, otherwise they were looking at a future of mud. The rail line like a linear star was elevated on dikes of gravel ballast above the mire. The trains rode on-high above the mud in any season.

     Albert saw the train as a violation of the natural order and beauty of things. It was also a main artery into the heart of evil cities where poisonous ways were inclined to flourish and could be directly pumped into the innocent country villages. Evil and sloth were like contagious pathogens that grew in the cities and the rail line could carry any malady directly into the heart of his town. Albert was determined to be off the railroad line and economic survival would be assured by the town’s loveliness.  

     Albert Applewhite succeeded in doing that which he set his mind to. Twenty-five years after he drove his trap over those lovely hills, there was a town resting as gently in that pleasant valley as a downy feather lies against the sides of a robin’s nest. Carefully nurtured buckeye and sycamore trees lined the streets, which were graveled with golden granite, and the sidewalks were all wood planked except for the Avenue of Commerce, where they were of chocolate brown cobbles. The houses had vertical clapboards and roofs of ruddy-red terra-cotta tile. The town was planned for one thousand people. The Avenue of Commerce was four blocks long and sixty feet wide. The commercial buildings were all of masonry construction with pink sandstone facades. Albert intended the town to become a center of commerce and banking for the entire region, and to set a standard in aesthetics.  

     It had been a tremendous amount of work, taken Albert’s fortune, and sizable investments from his old college classmates. It had worked, as he had expected it would. The whole enterprise would have astonished anyone who did not know Albert. When he was ready, Albert had advertisements placed in all the Eastern and many European papers. There were such radiant words and pictures that hundreds of hopeful residents had to be turned away with money in their hands. For the chosen, the rules were strict. Each applicant was carefully interviewed. They must be healthy of mind and body, have no fear of work, have a sterling background, adequate intelligence and education, sufficient funds and a good sense of visual harmony. Most importantly, they must venerate aesthetics. Albert needed a sizable pool of applicants, which he had achieved. Those who were chosen were subject to strict covenants placed upon moral conduct, religious training, and rigorous building codes. All residents were expected to be hard working and sober at all times. In the future, no property could be sold without approval of the other townsfolk. However, it was assumed that most property that changed hands would be passed on to the children. Artists were encouraged to apply for admission, but few did due to the strict rules.  

     To protect the town from haphazard growth, Albert purchased hundreds of surrounding acres. As far as one can see in all directions, the land would remain undisturbed or used as agricultural fields, with no building at all. The farmers would live in town and walk to their pastures as did the Europeans. The unsightly farm tools and manure piles would be hidden from view in wood lots.

    Number One Bank Street was the hub of town and Albert’s own office. The Bank of Applewhite stood three stories tall in the grand style of Italianate Revival. The main floor was eight feet above the street level and the windows arched twenty feet above that. The three story facade, which was a deep burgundy sandstone, was topped with great, six foot eaves supported with massive stone brackets. Behind the mahogany entry door, the floors were Carrera marble from the Italian mountains. They were set with a central medallion of red travertine outlined and divided into wedges with brass bands. Even the hottest days in mid August failed to penetrate its cool, vaulted twenty-two foot ceilings. Albert’s office was centered on the top floor of the building. In the middle of the room, was an elaborate cast iron, spiral staircase that extended through an opening in the roof and into a belvedere which capped the building. From its eight windowed sides, Albert Applewhite could survey the limits of his beautiful village and the fields beyond.  

**********************************************

     Two generations later, Florence Applewhite, Albert’s granddaughter, was centered in her life and needed to remain so. On summer nights, the sweet, warm, prairie air came in the balanced casement windows of her bedroom to where Florence lay on her back, waiting beneath crisp sheets. Her arms were at her sides, her fingers just touching her thighs. Her face was turned to the ceiling as her head pushed its hollow into the very center of the stiff pillow, her feet were aligned and pointing up. Florence’s body was centered on and aligned with the bed, which sat between a matching set of nightstands in the center of the dark room.

     This obsession was her secret. She knew it was absurd, but she needed it to still her heart. She had been handed an enormous and unwieldy gift, and debt, from her grandfather that she could scarcely manage. She had always been a centered and fair mayor (she called herself City Manager) of Applewhite for all her adult life. She was liked and she had the cooperation of the town people, but the task was overwhelming. Taking the center path, balancing the sides, was her means of survival. To do this her secret was to keep in absolute balance at all times, in mind and body.

     Florence’s house was five doors east and five doors west from the corners. Her bedroom, which used to be the parlor, was centered in the house. As Albert had planned, Applewhite was centered at the intersection of longitude 100 and latitude 41, seven miles north of the Union Pacific Railroad line in Dawson County, Nebraska. Latitude 41 passed through Florence’s entryway just north of the front door, and longitude 100 went right through the center of the house, as Albert intended, when he built the house long ago. Florence in her bed, lying just in the center was bisected by longitude 100.

     It traveled between her ankles and separated her body into two halves, one on each side of the geographical dividing line. She could actually feel its gossamer touch as it cleaved her navel, and breastbone, and divided her breasts into their separate geographic realms. It moved over and through her breastplate, larynx, uvula, between her two front teeth, traveled the valley of her upper lip, and the ridge of her nose, between her eyebrows and left her scalp by the tightly drawn, center-parted hair of her bi-laterally symmetrical head.

     Florence was ready for sleep and waited with irritation. The whistle was twenty-three minutes late. Finally, at 9:27, the Union Pacific eastbound freight sounded the rise and fall of its call at the Gothenburg crossing seven miles south. The forlorn call came in on the breeze over the wheat fields, woodrows, farmyards, single track dirt roads, in and around the sycamores and cottonwoods and buckeyes and into Florence’s windows and entered her ears, right and left.  
Now Florence could sleep.

*****************************************

     The afternoon of the same evening Florence lay abed, five men were moving furtively behind shadows in the vast Bailey Railyard. They were looking for a train heading east from North Platte, Nebraska. They dodged from track to track, with their packs and bedrolls shoved before and behind them. In the shade of a flatcar, carrying piggybacked trailers, they halted. They had seen the bull’s white pickup down a few cars and he may have seen them. It was brutally hot on this August afternoon. Cooper took a long pull on his battered, water canteen; acrid tepid water slid out. They had been in the yard for a day and a night looking for a catch-out to the east. Some railmen had seen them an hour before. The five train-hoppers had turned a corner behind a boxcar and landed right in front of them. The rails, as the were known, were sitting up against the cast iron wheels on a flatcar eating their lunch. They put down their sandwiches in one movement and eyed the hoppers, hard. A long, tense moment passed, then slow smiles came on.

   
     “Don’t worry, we won’t bust ya, we would just as soon be you anyway. Which way you going, east or west?”  
     The rails headed them to a train that was building out on the eastern side of the yard and would be going out that afternoon, with some buckets and boxcars.    
     “Watch out for the bull, he’s a real bad hombre,” the rails had called after them.

 
     The Bailey Yard is a gleaming tracery of polished tracks and ten thousand slamming, humping, switching, assembling, boxcars, flatcars, gondolas, buckets, tankers, and grinding locomotives in a confusion of shunting switches and interlaced rails under the smell of hot creosote oozing from millions of ties baking in the sun. In the center of the yard is the Hump, a hill, onto which the cars to be assembled into trains are pushed, and then rolled down by gravity again to the sorting tracks to be coupled into their manifests. It’s about eight miles from the west end to the east end of Bailey, a long way to walk on a hot afternoon. The five travelers moved on, dodging through the yard. At dusk they found their track number and the train they wanted, a mix of many kinds of rolling stock. They discovered an old MKT car, #5102, a graffiti dressed boxcar with its door standing open. The train had started to roll and was picking up speed. The men ran alongside the car, threw their gear into the open door and pulled themselves and each other aboard. They just made the catch-out. A boxcar is nice to ride but difficult to hop. The travelers tossed themselves on the floor, played-out. Not much was said. They picked their spots, shoved around some ancient dunnage bags to serve as sleeping pads and passed into a restless sleep. With the banks of the Platte River on its right side, the freight reached its cruising speed by the time it gained open country.

     Though he was an experienced train hopper, Cooper could not sleep tonight on the rails. The old boxcar slue side to side, banged and rattled, and resonated with the sing of the wheels on the track. The wind gusted against the pounding open door and whistled along the empty walls, but it was Cooper’s troubled mind that was keeping him awake this night. At 9:27, they heard the distant call from the engine, way up ahead at the front of the train. It was the Gothenburg crossing.  

     Cooper had just closed his eyes when he felt himself sliding toward the front of the car. With a series of thuds and brake-squeals the train came to a shuddering and completely unexpected halt. All movement and sound quit. The riders sat up and listened. Soon voices were heard outside their car. The five men were motionless, their breath was held. The voices gathered down the track. Cooper moved to the doorway and in the dark ventured to bend his head just outside. From overheard talk, he found that an electronic defect detector had sounded the alarm on this train and the engineer had brought the train to an emergency stop. A hot wheel had been detected some cars down, caused by a dragging brake shoe heating the wheel to a dangerous temperature. The train could be here for some time.

     The boxcar riders weighed their options, they didn’t know how long the train might be out of service, and the crew might use that time to check out the train for riders. The interstate highway was near, the decision was clear. The men slipped out the door in the dark as quietly as they had entered. Down the ballast embankment and a short walk brought them to the Interstate Highway where they stopped in the grass by the ditch and looked back at the long, black line of the train, dead on the highroad. Cooper threw his bedroll into the grass off the roadside berm. There was no hope of stopping a car tonight. In the morning, they would head out separately in search of easterly travelers.

     The gaunt Cooper looked as if he were assembled of somewhat mismatched parts, put together by a bridge builder who was in a hurry and grabbed what was handy. Great, bony arms and legs were cantilevered from a lean torso which also supported a neck of some length and a rather small head with large, clearly defined features. Despite his ill-sorted proportions, Cooper had a rightness about him.

     In their bedrolls, the five men settled into the evening landscape and disappeared into their own thoughts. Cooper rested back onto the matted flannel of the old blanket, positioning his head above a clump of grass. Carefully he adjusted his length to accommodate the irregularities of the prairie floor; a knee bent to navigate around a lump pushing through the bedroll and a hip placed above a hollow. Over his forehead, the summer drift of air carried the pungent and sweet smell of the August grass.  

     Five years ago this August night and two thousand miles away, a car with a woman, Cooper’s wife, at the wheel and their two little daughters asleep in their car seats in the back traveled northward on State Highway 32 through the marshy barrens of the Great Dismal Swamp, southwest of Norfolk, Virginia. They were coming home from a family visit. From out of the dark came an unlit car traveling at an enormous speed on the wrong side of the road. The impact was so great, deer four miles away raised their grazing heads and moved further into the bush.

     Cooper was a steam fitter at the shipyards in Norfolk. A master fitter for seven years. Best in the trade. He was a fulfilled man with an adored family. His grief was boundless, the business of life mattered so little to him after his loss he stopped trying. His achievements that had come mighty hard eroded quickly. He lost his job for lack of concern, his savings diminished to nothing. He was inconsolable, friends could do nothing. He lost his house and had little interest in keeping contact with old allies. Cooper had been set adrift, his existence had become useless to him. Only his soul was left standing, it still had meaning, he would not abandon it.  

     He drifted into New York City that winter. In March, he was on the sidewalk propped up against an old iron front building on Bleaker Street, not even begging. Two years later, he started wandering between coasts.
     And now, this August evening, it was just five years to the day and Cooper was ready to resume his life again; he had attained a measure of peace within. However, getting back into that role again was a long reach up from the underside where he now dwelt, he was not sure it could be done.

     The quiet train was still visible across the way. Cooper stretched his head back to ease his neck and recalled a time, forty years ago, to another breakdown on a trip with his parents when he was fifteen and they were driving across the country in their Studebaker. The young Cooper loved long distance driving. By the hour, he would sit at the open window and let the passing country play out nameless games. At times, his hand out the window was a silver plane speeding over the land, lifting and diving to an undisclosed rendezvous over the distant hills. Sometimes, Cooper would be a bounding deer running in the fields along with the car, leaping fences and charging up cliffs at the speed of the highway. They had just passed through a little town in Kansas, when a low metallic crack came from deep in the bowels of the engine, and instantly a white blanket of vapor came from under the hood, the engine had seized. They coasted to the roadside. The bounding deer had been brought down with an arrow to the heart. The Studebaker was dragged back to the little town where they spent days waiting for parts. Cooper and his sisters sat on the public swings in the town park or journeyed  the sidewalks.

     Now, Cooper, the aging kid who loved travel so much, was with another family of sorts, broken down on the highway, and he hardly knew their names. The five men, in fact, had just met in Stockton a few days before, drawn together by their mutual desire to hop the rails to the east. There were two Franks, Steve, John, and Cooper. Steve was only thirty-two. He was a computer programmer from Washington State whose need for drugs was greater than his need to work, so he lost both. One of the Franks came from Millinocket, Maine, a lumberman by trade. At the mill one day, a momentary distraction on the line and seven of his fingers were destroyed beyond repair. Despite his insurance, Frank slipped through ever lower levels of the economy without the ability to use his hands to work. The other Frank was from Duluth, Minnesota and a drinker. He once had a family and owned a house. John had been on the road for twenty years and never expected any more from his life.  

     The five men didn’t exchange any of this with each other, for tomorrow their loyalties were to be broken as they headed out alone. Like prisoners in jail, the homeless always have one important question, “Why are you here?” It is asked over and over again without fear of redundancy because it is the only question that matters. But the homeless are more careful in asking, for being there can be an act of their own making and the question can be heartbreaking to answer. The question is not asked among casual travel companions or brief encounters. Their lives, before becoming homeless, can be so cherished and significant, that it can only be communicated at meaningful encounters.  
     The men rolled over in their blankets and listened to the crickets.

                                        ***************************************

     In the twenty-first century, Cleveland, Ohio still bore its medieval city structure. The ruling class lived on an escarpment above the Cuyahoga River plain. Cleveland and Shaker Heights are located here amid a forest of aged oak and maple. The stone-clad estates have slate roofs, towers, ramparts, and bolted, wrought iron gates guarding carriage houses and private gardens. Descending the plateau is to traverse descending levels of economic conditions, into and through the dangerous streets of Hough and down past the once fiery blast furnaces left over from an ancient industrial age, squatting at the sullen shores of the foul river. The Flats lie at the river plain’s bottom.

     Just up from the Flats and north of Euclid Avenue is a district of once substantial houses befitting the emerging, upper middle class at the time they were built. The banisters and wainscot were made from black walnut and the floor's parquet. Later in the century, the middle class was drawn to the suburbs and these houses were abandoned to the working class. The libraries became bedrooms, the parlors were turned into kitchens, and vinyl sheeting was laid over the hardwood floors. Fire escapes were placed at the back windows. Single family houses became home to three and four working households.

     Francine and Douglas and their three children occupied one of these houses until recently.
Francine was a part-time paralegal, trained in real estate, she handled the accounts at a die casting foundry and Douglas worked at a copper rolling mill as a machine operator. They were planning a move to the suburbs in a couple of years.

     One Friday morning, Douglas found a memo taped to the front of his locker instructing him to see his section manager. Without much explanation he was given a two week notice. It was nothing personal, just an administrative adjustment. He could work out the two weeks or leave on that day with a portion of his projected wages. After lunch and after the new reality set in he chose to leave the job that very day, the job he had expected to hold most of his adult life. His head was reeling and his legs were stiff and distant as he walked home over the broken sidewalks kicking at the fallen leaves as he did as a child, right here in this neighborhood all those years ago.

     Two weeks later Francine was laid off from her paralegal job as an economic move on the part of her employer. Her boss was apologetic and sorry but he needed to do this.
     Francine and Douglas were smart and unemotional about their new situation. They both received some severance money and when that was gone unemployment would start coming in. In addition, Francine had a small balance in her checking account that could carry them for an additional month. Yes, there were two credit cards with credit balance available also. Francine and Douglas took the situation in stride. Douglas started looking for work immediately.

     He went to the mills and plants where he knew many former high school friends and work buddies. He filled out applications, but the receptionists smiled and shook their heads. There were no openings. Douglas found that many of his contacts were already out looking for a position themselves. A month passed with no prospects, and a second and a third month. Francine was looking for anything that could equal daycare costs. They discussed moving to a new location outside the city or to another town. The risks were too high. If they relocated and still found no work they would have spent their precious money to no avail.  

     In the fourth month they decided to take their chances and not pay rent. The unemployment checks stopped soon after. Douglas had searched for work for one hundred and fifty days. In despair, he returned to an earlier job offer at a fast food restaurant. Douglas and Francine were painfully aware that his salary was way short of covering their needs.

     Francine now realized that she must face her most punishing reality; they could no longer give the children a decent home. She decided to split the children; her oldest two went to her sister’s across town and their ten year old would stay with them. They had descended into desperation now. A garage sale and a used furniture store netted them enough to buy food for another thirty days. Douglas’ meager salary went to pay some selective bills and a partial rent, which came too late. A month and a half after they stopped paying rent, a thirty day eviction notice was pinned on the door. One month after that, they moved out. They formed a shaky plan. Douglas would move in with a friend, their youngest would be sent to Albany to live with an uncle, and Francine would head out west to find work.  

     Francine had managed to hold one credit card out of use. With this, her clothes in cardboard boxes, a hairbrush, toothbrush and her eyeglasses in her pocket, she left Cleveland, Ohio in their old family sedan, perhaps forever. She would head west alone while the car and the credit card were still working. Then, one by one, her family would join her after she had secured a job and a home. As fraught with dangers as it may be, it was their best shot.

     Douglas had given her his last paycheck in cash, to be saved for an emergency. She would buy food and gas on the card. She would sleep in the car behind gas stations. The car seemed to be in fair mechanical condition, but years of hard winters had rusted through the fenders and doors leaving them wobbling like bed sheets in the wind.

     On an early August morning, Francine drove down Chester Avenue to join State Route Ten west, and tried not to think too much. She had been the last to leave the now empty apartment on the third floor under the roof of that old house. They had been there seven years and came to feel some attachment. How many, she wondered, had come through there before. Chips of paint knocked off the window sill revealed dozens of coats on their tiny edges like geological strata, each a different color and hue, each representing a resident’s attempt to establish a home.

     She stopped at Douglas’ hamburger joint for a last good-bye and he joined her in his apron for coffee at one of the plastic topped pedestal tables. The manager gave him a few minutes. The words were not easy. Francine was plumbing the bottom of her strength. The significance of the moment overwhelmed them so they could only talk of the mechanics of her voyage. She had never seen Douglas cry before. She slipped out the door and into the car without looking over her shoulder. She drove off with no notion of her future or destination, or even if she would ever see him again. Francine passed near her sister’s house off Dennison Road but it would be too torturous to see her children for a last time.

     The summer air washed over Francine’s tear stained face as she gained the countryside. She would stay on the secondary road where she could drive slower and avoid pushing the old car to highway speeds. Francine was in an altered state as she had been for the past few months, little seemed real, it was a solstice of sorts. In a small town west of Cleveland, Francine was stopped at a traffic light opposite a large, dark, store window. There in that widow’s reflection was an old brown, rusted sedan with the back seat full of boxes and clothes piled to the roof and behind the wheel was a haggard, middle-aged woman with unkempt hair. The shock was so profound Francine missed the light and only fumbled forward when a row of car horns behind her brought her back. There in that window she had seen the shattered, homeless creature she had become.

     The first night on the road, Francine parked near a lamp post behind an all-night restaurant.  
She slept behind the wheel upright with all the doors locked. Francine was anxious about her credit card each time she stopped for gas, for fear that the credit bank would catch up with her.

 
     From Ohio to Indiana, Illinois and Iowa she coaxed the old car along at forty-five miles per hour. By the end of the second day, she knew there was no return to Cleveland, she was committed. On the third day, at a gas station next to the air pump, she waited behind the wheel. It was mid afternoon, and she realized she was too terrified to start the car and move it out into the traffic again, her resolve had collapsed. She could simply not muster the courage to continue. Francine looked down at her thin arms on the wheel. She lifted one to examine the back of her forearm which was gray with dirt and streaked in rivulets. She hadn’t washed in days. She got out of the car and walked down the road to talk to herself. In half an hour when she came back, she washed with paper towels in the ladies room between visitors and drove back onto the highway again.

     At Council Bluffs, Iowa, Francine pulled out onto the interstate highway to make better time. She was getting anxious to get - where?  West?   She was west. An hour and twenty minutes after Francine joined the interstate, the car’s engine began to race as though it had shifted into second gear. With somber care Francine exited to an interstate gas station to fill up and have a mechanic take a look.

 
     “The transmission going out,” said the man from under the hood. This reality was just taking hold when the attendant came out of the office with the card held high between index and thumb.
     “It’s no good, no Ma’am, it’s not accepted, you have another?”  

     She paid the gas charge with her precious cash and drove out onto the highway, this time the car shifted as it should. Creeping along on the right side of the road, she coolly assessed her options. Without the card, the car could not be fixed, she did not have enough cash for a ticket to anywhere, and it would get her very little distance as gas money. Soon, by itself, the old car shifted down again into second and Francine slowed to thirty-five on the berm. Almost no options, she thought. She eased off the exit to a rest stop. Five men with their tattered bedrolls were standing beside a picnic table. “Why not, she thought, dire conditions require dire solutions. Truth be told, I’m one of them now.” The homeless woman coasted to a stop on the edge of the grass, by the staring men.

                ***********************************

     After their night’s sleep on the verge, the train hoppers were ready to try hitching rides from the rest stop. Together their chances for catching a ride would be almost nil, so they were preparing to head out separately. But they were in no exceptional hurry to get to any particular place and were a little reluctant to split their companionship. That’s when Francine arrived.

     Sometime later a van drove up and stopped by Francine’s car. Four aging hippies jumped out, apparently anxious to make contact. The ten travelers sat around the table talking over things and wondering why they were all there. There were eight men and two women.  

   **************************************

     Real was born as Norman Goldman, but legally changed his name to Realman Freeman at the age of seventeen because he believed it worked on many levels. When he was stoned, and at other times, he preferred to be called Real Free Man. Either way, he was always Real to his friends.

     All this was fine but just now, at the age of fifty-seven, Realman was in California sitting behind the wheel of his 1978 VW bus in the Safeway parking lot waiting for his old lady to finish shopping, and he was depressed. He had been thinking about his future. Money had never worried him much, it would always come, one way or another, career and direction didn’t bother him at all, he hardly thought of that. The future of the world didn’t enter his mind particularly, when it all let loose he wouldn’t be around anyway. “All that green living is bullshit no matter how you cut it. It don’t mean a thing.” The cold, grey-blue morning sky depressed him greatly though, because in the rear view mirror it picked out the gray, no, white hairs in his beard. “In less than three years he would be sixty years old, and man, that’s past half a century, only forty to hundred fucking years. Real is becoming a real, old man. An anachronism. It looked like he outlived his calling.”

     He did not know how to deal with this.
     Real got out his wallet to make sure of the numbers. He did the math with his driver’s license. “Sure enough, that’s it.”
     Real, as Norman Goldman, was born in Boston and lived his first sixteen years without much event in an old, wooden walk-up in Medford. His father, mother, brothers, uncles and aunts all expected him to take the position “held” for him at the factory where they all worked.  
But he didn’t.

     “How could you,”His father said. But he could, and did.
     Norman, as Real, went to Maine and joined a commune, of sorts, outside Rumford. They bought a very old, near abandoned farmhouse for fifty thousand dollars. Three thousand down, five hundred each from the six members and an easy mortgage with the owner.

     His first summer was pure heaven. They worked a little, and sort of farmed, as they called it.
Real spent each night in a different girl’s bed. Life was his appleblossom, he didn’t know any life could be so wondrous. Each day was a treasure to behold.

     Then came winter.  
     In January, alone on his cot, too cold to sleep beneath the thin covers at two o’clock in the morning, Real could hear the frozen branches of the maples rattling together in the wind outside.
Thin, icy fingers of the north wind pushed through the cracks in the floor and reached up under his blankets. The well froze, the front door froze closed, the toilet froze, the milk carton froze on the Thin, icy fingers of the north wind pushed through the cracks in the floor and reached up under his blankets. The well froze, the front door froze closed, the toilet froze, the milk carton froze on the kitchen table. The three girls went home to Maryland and in December the two guys took off to New York on New Year’s Eve. Real was alone. He slept in the kitchen in front of the wood stove. He ran out of firewood left over from the farmer in the barn, so he burned the kitchen chairs, then the porch railings and the inside stair rails and banister before it occurred to him that there was a forest at the end of the meadow.

     In May, Real decided farming was not for him, so he traded the farm for a 1960 Chevy pickup truck and drove to Syracuse, New York to meet some old friends and get stoned.  

     That radiant, spring Sunday was marvelously warm and soft and the grass was so tender it felt like damp air in his hand. They had driven out of town for a picnic at a  field near Cicero Swamp and Real’s friends gave him a very special sugar cube to suck on. Shortly after his arms fell off he passed out. Much later that afternoon Real drove his pickup back into town with the rest of the picnickers riding in the back. Suddenly the pickup became a stagecoach and his friends were his passengers who must get to Cheyenne as soon as possible. But the horses were tired and their hoofs were clattering so loudly he had to get them off the pavement. Real mounted the curb and drove his team across the suburban lawns to soothe their tired feet.

     Realman worked his way west and ended in the hills behind Berkeley, California. He had grown a long beard and taken on two huge Husky dogs he had rescued from their urban prison, chained and nailed to the floor of a loft in Chicago. But Real could plainly see that California was his plum. In the hills behind Berkeley, he found his path to a eucalyptus canyon and was given directions that led down to an abandoned railroad track, it was almost dark. He stopped in the clearing, the air was hushed. He let out the dogs and walked into the woods. To his surprise and delight, the smell of pot claimed his nose immediately and there in front of him were people. The woods were full of people, flower children, quietly rotating around dozens of campfires, spotted like stage sets over the forest floor. Girls in long flowered dresses circled the fires in a gentle, walking dance of some ritual, their lovely arms overhead, hands clasped. People were in the trees too, perched on platforms and cozy nests on high. There was even a Volkswagen van up there balanced on an enormous limb lashed by ropes, with a small campfire burning on its floor.

     Real volleyed through half a dozen communes from the Berkeley Hills to Mendocino. He spent the better part of a year at Sunrise, did his time at The Haight. On the streets of San Francisco, he garnered some fame as Supergrape, due to his purple outfit and elaborate sidewalk pranks. Real moved into the Big Sur scene and lived inside the base of an ancient redwood as a part-time hermit in the bowels of a dark canyon. Then, down the road at Gorda, Real learned carpentry skills and built himself a plywood dome high above the Pacific Ocean in the hot, prickly manzanita and poison oak. He did Mexico and New Mexico, and lived on the beach in Venice, California.  He had battled through so many relationships that he had long lost count. He probably couldn’t remember any of their names. If pressed he might know a few.

      The problem was that many of his loyal brethren just weren’t there anymore, they had traveled off the map or migrated into the straight world. He was searching for that elusive word that meant ‘something not connected.’ He was looking in the rear view mirror at his facial wrinkles, trying to stretch them out of existence by puffing out his cheeks. Trouble was that he didn’t look as he felt. In his mind, nothing had changed since he left home. Inside he was still just a ‘fry’, as his father used to call him. The fry needed to keep on playing with life.

     “Wrinkles and stiff knees - fuckoff.”
      That was the word - had he become irrelevant?
     He was now sitting in the parking lot at the Safeway grocery store in Paso Robles, California thinking about his body’s advancing age and the fact that it had taken, done, been, felt and fucked just about everything it could find. It needed something else, something different.

     Real saw his new old lady coming out of the supermarket behind the brown-bagged shopping cart. He reflected for just a moment then started up the van and drove off before she looked up.

     Realman was heading back to Medford. He contemplated his parents. He considered if they were still alive? In Sparks, Nevada he picked up some potheads to share the driving, two men and a woman. He introduced himself as Norman Real. Three days later, they pulled off the highway in Nebraska at a roadside rest stop and found themselves in the company of five men and a woman and one old car who seemed to be living there. Nobody was sure where they were going next.

*******************************

     Inadvertently, Francine had become the cement to bond the rail hoppers. Over the day, they had shared enough personal information to hold them together. They talked over their situation and decided to stick together, for now anyway, and tried to make some plans. The weather pattern had dislodged and it looked as though it was forging something big. It was just then that the Microbus with California plates pulled in and its occupants ambled over to talk. As the day darkened above and a giant cloud assembled itself, the homeless people congregated beneath.

     Sometime later that day a car drove into the rest stop and disgorged three kids, two girls and a boy, and drove off. They sat on park table tops and smoked cigarettes. They looked to be mid-teens. After an hour, Cooper introduced himself. “Lost kids from the Chicago suburbs,” he told the others. “They’re alright, just confused.” They later joined the group. That night just before bedtime, a lone walker came into their camp and without a word sat down next to them with the indication that he too was a part of the clan.

     There were now fourteen.
     They rose the next morning hungry. The interstate was hostile to their kind so they jammed into the two vehicles and scooted down the highway to the nearest exit. In the cool of the morning, Francine’s car behaved. The old US 30 parallels the Interstate and travel would be easier there, with maybe the prospect of food somewhere. Six were in Francine’s car with the clothes boxes strapped on top and eight were in the Microbus. Just after they turned onto the small highway, they pulled up behind another old car with the hood up and a family of six migrant farm workers. There were two small kids in the back seat, an older daughter, an uncle and two parents. Steve, the computer programmer, was a mechanic of sorts and took a look. “No oil pressure,” said the father. Steve started her up. At idle the tired engine sounded like a bag of marbles and he quickly turned it off. With a rope made from bed sheets, Francine pulled the car with hers at a crawl to an abandoned gas station to get it off the highway. With each addition to their group new plans were necessary, and their need for breakfast increased.  

      There were twenty of them now.  
     From behind the abandoned gas station, a surprised looking man in khaki pants and shirt buttoned up to his neck emerged. His long, thin face beneath his twill hat worked very hard to make sense of the people assembled by the rusty pumps. He decided it must be time to move on. He disappeared again and re-emerged from the other side of the building pushing a large rubber-tired wheelbarrow full of objects and bearing a heavy wooden cross standing high in front.      Terence, as he was later known, headed east at a quick walk down US 30. “Wait, wait,” they all called, and Terence stopped. The rest was all misunderstanding. Terence took it as a sign. The sign he had been looking for from the Arizona desert to the Allegheny Mountains, these people must be the Chosen Ones he was seeking. They, however, were looking for directions, but never told Terence that.

 ******************************  

     Terence had an elaborate shop for fixing bicycles in the basement of his parent’s sumptuous house in Bel Air, California. Since birth, he had been surrounded with opulence, much to his discomfort. His investment managing father had not the slightest notion of his son’s direction or necessities. His mother had passed through her distraught period with him, and therapy time, and moved into her uneasy liberal acceptance mode. They went to elaborate extremes at dinner parties to avoid the subject of their son’s current occupation and activities, changing the conversation adroitly to their talented daughter at law school riding high on her dean’s list.    

     Terence collected discarded bicycles from the streets of Bel Air and Beverly Hills set out by the trash cans on garbage days. He made it a point to get up on those mornings at 4:30 to make the rounds and beat the garbage truck. Many were only slightly used, but with still shiny paint they were put out for trash as no longer useful. Terence could not understand the people in his environment. It disturbed him immensely that humans could be so wasteful. He went through his parent’s garbage to remove discards, and repaired them instead. Used tin cans in the trash troubled him, they were so well made and had so much life left in them. On a good day, he would collect five or six bikes, wheel them together back to his basement and soon have them in fine shape to sell to students at UCLA.  

     By twenty-two, Terence could take it no longer, he tried to set out on his own but had nowhere to go. His parents were worried and vexed about him, and also much relieved at the prospect of having him on his way. Terence’s father found him a caretaking position at a friend’s house in Pebble Beach, up the coast. It was one of five homes they owned in various places around the world, so they were seldom there. The house was 35,000 square feet of polished granite, marble, and rainforest hardwood floors. Of course, it was on the golf course. Terence’s job was to see that the maintenance crews were showing up and to let them in the gated property. He was to send an email report to the family secretary once a week. One of the five she collected.

     After the move, Terence was free of his family but at his new residence was still under the crushing weight of vast ownership which was hugely upsetting to him. He had little to occupy him in his new position. With his small flashlight he wandered the large, dark house at night, through the indoor gymnasium and butler’s pantry, the uncounted bedrooms, the massive great room, the seven car garage with its allotment of fine automobiles awaiting their owners return. He wandered into the third floor servants quarters and attic. In the attic he found a set of extremely good brass cymbals left over from previous owners.

     Terence had a proclivity for music and soon taught himself to play the cymbals. He assembled his instruments in the cavernous great room for its acoustic qualities and played all night long. He perfected a percussion form of DNA music which echoed transcendently through the house each night. In short order the neighbors complained, and Terence was offended, and so knew that he must leave.

     With a small portion of his sizable savings, he purchased a tatty old station wagon and took to the highway where he had wished to be all the time and didn’t realize it until now. He headed to the desert country of Southern California. He needed time to think, time alone. He soon lost contact with his family.  

     That was when God came to him. To this point, he and God had little to do with each other. God had somehow overlooked Terence’s presence here on Earth, and Terence had never had a thought about Him, good, bad or indifferent. It happened one night out on the Carrizo Plain, a hefty, unpeopled piece of prairie in inland California. Terence was in his sleeping bag on the ground watching the stars traveling the sky when there came to him an awareness throughout his whole body. Abruptly he could feel and see everything inside, in his intestine and stomach, his evening meal making its passage, from cecum to colon, he could see the blood passing through his heart valves as they opened and closed. He could see his spinal column lying above the ground, and the thin, strong sheets of fascia containing his muscles. He could see the information coursing his brain and the process of thought. He watched himself thinking. Into this process there came a powerful extraneous element, Terence watched it proceed into his brain and beyond, into his soul. It spoke to him, quite clearly.    

     It said that he should go out into the world to inform others of his thoughts and concerns, it was his duty, he had no choice in the matter, it will be done. When it is accomplished and he has completed his duty, he will be given the sign that all is well, and he will be free once more.  

     Terence was so profoundly moved, he sat straight up in his sleeping bag, but the moment was past. The sensation was gone. Nevertheless, he had been given a mandate. In the starry, dark, lonesome night, Terence smiled to himself and shook his head. There it was. No question.

     Yet, what was he to do?  What did he have to tell.  He was short of words, hardly a good envoy for Him. There was much that he would correct, it was true. His primary annoyance was that there was too much stuff scattered around the land. A lot of  it was just human junk, all over the place, you couldn’t escape it.  He was deeply bothered by this. Was that it? Was that the message? If so, how would he convey this?

     After the rest of the night passed, sleeplessly, Terence came to the conclusion that the signs will be clear when he finds them. He was ready to take up the cause. Still dazed, Terence piled his things in the car and drove off down the road looking for something he might recognize as meaningful. About noon the next day, Terence came upon a half broken, highway billboard that offered some shade for his lunch stop. He drove into the sign’s shadow off the highway and broke out his cold rice luncheon.  As he sat up against the side of his car with his head thoughtfully cast downward, his eyes fell on a dark cross on the ground, the shadow of the frame of the broken billboard support behind him. Terence spun his head up to the sky, and there above him was a shaft of weathered wood with a cross member fastened to its uppermost end. It took little effort for him to pull it down. It broke cleanly at a joint and came away as the clearest sign he could imagine, a weathered greywood beam with a slightly tilted cross member. With reverence, Terence tied the cross to the top of his car and drove on.  

     In the next little town he stopped for supplies at a grocery on the main drag. On his way back to the car he passed a hardware store with its goods spread on the sidewalk. Terence’s pant leg caught on the protruding edge of the axle of a brand-new wheelbarrow angled into the walkway. Terence fumbled, his groceries flew forward down to the pavement. The proprietor rushed from the store with helping hands and nervous apologies, only to find the tripped up pedestrian ready to buy the offending wheelbarrow there on the spot. Years later, he would still be talking about this sale. For Terence, it was an act of God. He had been given his marching orders.    

     Terence marched back to his car with the fine new wheelbarrow in front of him. Only a few things went from the car into the wheelbarrow. Terence secured the wooden cross, standing high, to its middle, with twine, much as the stays on a sailing vessel’s mast. With crayon Terence wrote a bold paper note, later replaced with a more durable plastic sign, lashed to the wheelbarrow’s side.

                           WASTE  NOT - WANT  LESS -  GOD IS WATCHING YOU  

     A young Latino, looking out for a day-job, had been watching him from the back of the parking lot. Terence beckoned him over, and with few words signed over his car, title, and keys to the amazed young man.

     Moments later, Terence began walking with his cross and wheelbarrow and a new pair of shoes out over the country roads to carry his message as far and wide as he could. He intended to traverse the whole of North America, maybe several times, there was a lot of work to be done. From the onset, Terence was filled with satisfaction at the completeness and clarity of his new duty.  

     During the next few years, Terence had trial, and fulfillment, harrowing adventure, and disappointment, and many pairs of shoes. Seven years after he had launched his mission he was in need of the sign from Him to tell him that he had completed his task, he was foot sore and exhausted. At that moment he was traveling US Route 30 in Nebraska. He had taken a rest behind an abandoned gas station and was about to move on when he encountered the band of twenty travelers who let him know most clearly that they had been sent to him. Terence always attempted to show no outward emotion, but this time he could not control it, he was elated and thrilled, and he worked his mouth into a smile. His task was almost finished.

****************************************

     The final ingredient to the group was Ornel Flaven. He came in on a walk right up to the group and said, “howdy.” Ornel was a local and a very decent man who had no time for the subtleties of life. Ornel worked around here and there and managed just fine. Ornel told them there was a fine little town over that rise where they could get a yummy breakfast. As a matter of fact he would join them and point the way.  
     There were now twenty two. They assembled on the little road and set off for Applewhite.

*****************************************

     In Florence Applewhite’s cottage she was up early, it was a seminal day for her, though she did not know its full potential. She emerged from her room fully dressed, passed the fireplace, long disused, over which hung a somber portrait of her Grandfather.
 
      (Albert Applewhite, 1844 - 1934, Founder and Lifetime Mayor of the Town of Applewhite)

     Before breakfast Florence went to the backyard to work with her lilies. Out the back door she immediately knew something was odd. The sky was grim, the air was still and pensive, she hunched her shoulders and went to her lilies. She could have afforded a gardener but she enjoyed her garden and she was mindful of her neighbors, they knew she was prudent and humble as her Grandfather would have wanted.

     Florence was a trim, good-looking woman in her late forties and never married. They said it was for fear of losing her name. She let them believe what they may, her reasons were too complex to explain, maybe someday. Albert had left all his real estate holdings to her father to keep from dividing it up. Much of his money and other investments went to his sibling, who quickly left town. Albert had chosen wisely for Florence’s father had passed it down to her completely intact and standing well. Florence, who was an only child, had held it together through many storms, the worst of which could be breaking on her shores today. Florence owned a good portion of the town and hundreds of agricultural and undeveloped acres surrounding the town. All her rental income went to pay the real estate taxes. But there was always a shortage due to hard times and low rental return, Florence was in arrears for five years. The county tax board was threatening to seize her holdings. Today she would meet with the board at 10:00 AM in her Grandfather’s old office atop the bank building, hardly used for the last fifty years. Only the top floor, and her Grandfather’s office were retained when the bank declared insolvency and was later sold at auction. Usually Florence preferred to do her business at home.  

     Florence was prepared to plead to the board that her property should be reclassified as a heritage property due to its age and intact condition and its standard of architectural artistry, therefore the tax board needed to reassess at a lower rate, which would give her a tax credit. This was a sound argument she knew, but the attorney, the only one the town could afford, was not a fighter and would likely bend to the will of the tax board.  

     As Florence closed her front door behind her she knew that things would be changed when she opened it again. To the left of the door in the cement of the threshold was an inscription:
                                                                A. A. 1900
     It was carefully lettered next to a hand print made in the cement, a big hand, a capable hand, hers would hardly fill its palm. She had decided as a child the only way to fill his hand print was to remain true to his philosophy and remain completely centered in her own life, for imbalance would bring disharmony and chaos, and chaos was against Albert’s theory of life and beauty. But now this morning on the eve of her ordeal, Florence for the first time questioned her Grandfather’s thoughts. “Was chaos something really to be feared, and indeed could it even be avoided?”

     The walk to the old bank building was a short one. The town, as always, was quiet. Such a beautiful place, thought Florence, such a shame.

     It can be argued that it takes at least one hundred years for the things humankind builds to fit comfortably into their environment, for their unnatural surfaces to yield to the work of the sun, wind, and rain, and the mosses and lichen to grow. A hundred years for limb and leaf to grace a house or pathway and the ivy to frame the frame on a door. And so it took nature to finish the work which Albert Applewhite began over one hundred years ago. In Applewhite, the summer sun never reaches the gravel streets without being dappled, refracted, and reflected. The buckeye and sycamore put down by Albert’s own hands one hundred years ago now roof the streets in leafy arches. The cottages of Applewhite, lovely to see when they were built, are now, after one hundred years, as fair as anything that could be found in the Cotswolds.

     As the town of Applewhite grew more beautiful over the years, the people of Applewhite grew more insular. Now, as the third and fourth generations of Applewhite moved into place, the town was in trouble in many ways. The first thirty years of Applewhite’s history were magnificent, it became the hub of the county’s farm industry. The Bank of Applewhite held the assets, mortgages and accounts of hundreds of farms and businesses. The schools attracted the very best teachers. The stores had the finest supplies, available when others were out. To the people of the other villages, the dream of living in Applewhite was a blessing few could consider, for ownership was only open by marriage or the rare opportunity to buy. It was understood that there would be no expansion of the town itself, there would be no new building, its population was to be stable, not to increase or diminish. The land outside of the town would be forever green, no commercial or tract development, no dealerships, no malls. Though families in Applewhite could sell their houses, few did. Their grandparents had given much to achieve residency here and their parents had passed it down to them. They were special, and considered themselves mighty fortunate to live in this most beautiful of towns.  

     At the intersection of Avenue of Commerce and Bank Street sits Number One Bank Street, Albert’s pride, his bank. For forty years it prospered. Decades of grimy sweating farmers sat beneath its fluted, white, marble columns while the bank officers pondered their loans. Albert was a good man and a humanitarian banker, he often extended loans he knew were risky in order to nourish the community and keep it prosperous, for thirty years it worked. But the financial world was tumbling through chaotic years and leaving Albert and his small town ethics behind.

The year Albert retired, the financial world came apart, it was 1931.  
     The bank of Applewhite, which had so many thousands of loans and mortgages, could no longer pay its own debts and had to close its doors. The scrolled, etched glass and brass cages of teller windows and polished marble counters were gutted and sold at auction. The empty cash drawers, of dove-tailed red oak, were ripped out. The day books, with their immaculate ledgers of payments and earnings entered by pen and ink in beautiful Palmer cursive, were gathered and boxed in the sub-basement. The mahogany front doors were boarded.  

     The once magnificent building with its burgundy sandstone stood empty and for sale. For fifty-one years there were no takers, its glorious facade was blackened and crumbling.  

     In 1930, the year before Albert retired, Ira Parks came to him with yet another loan request. It was his last bid for solvency. During the good years, Ira was a marginal, if not shoddy farmer, the depression pushed him over the margin. He was turned down for the loan, and that evening after supper, out behind the chicken shed, he shot himself through the head with his rabbit gun.

     Fifty years later, his daughter, May Parks Reed, bought the closed bank building at a bedrock price and turned it into a breakfast restaurant and the most successful business in town. May’s Bank Café was the hub of the town. The name was posted above the mahogany doors with a significant space between May’s Bank and the word Café. Though logic would have told her otherwise, May had blamed the generations of the family Applewhite not only for her father’s death but their years of problems. It was with great pleasure she owned Number One Bank Street. Now, scrambled eggs and white bread toast changed hands beneath the fluted columns that still held twenty-two foot ceilings. Now the farmers, their big bottoms hanging over the chrome and naugahyde stools, waited for their bacon.

     Upstairs in her Grandfather’s old office, Florence Applewhite was having a terrible day, perhaps the worst of her life. She had been meeting on the top floor of the bank building for some hours with the tax men from the county and her attorney was performing poorly, as she had feared.  

     “Now Florence,” he would say, “they do have a point.” Or to the tax men, “Well, that’s not exactly how I would put it, but you make your case well.” Then again to Florence, “Well you see, you must first pay the taxes before you debate them.”

     The tax board gave little credence to Florence’s arguments and request for leniency on grounds of architecture, history, or beauty. That didn’t matter much in this day of reality and the practical rather than the attractive. Florence could feel her shores erode with wave upon wave of legal assaults. Her stewardship of Applewhite was becoming a tragedy. Florence walked to the window. Her sorrow was immense as she looked down upon the once splendid, broad Avenue of Commerce now with closed stores and empty streets, broken sidewalks and last year’s dead weeds pushed up through the cracks. Applewhite was coming apart at the seams. She turned back to the waiting lawyers with capitulation on her mind when she became aware of the barking.

     Applewhite’s dogs were well behaved. What was all this fuss? The barking was all over town but mostly off on the county road. Florence glanced through the window in that direction, caught a glimpse of something and excused herself as she bolted for the stairs to the belvedere over the roof. The attorneys, deprived of their moment, were vexed.

     From the vantage of the belvedere, Florence saw to be true that which she thought she had seen but couldn’t quite believe. The county road is a straight line extension of the Avenue of Commerce allowing Florence’s view from high atop the bank building the clarity she needed. Surrounded by its own lingering dust rising high in the still air forming a diaphanous veil, and herded by two rows of rankled barking dogs, the caravan entered the village; three old cars, a wheelbarrow, and a herd of ragged beggars.

     May Parks had closed the restaurant for the day. She and her assistant had cleaned the morning’s breakfast dishes, scraped the big black grill and turned off the oven. She now sat alone at one of the tables sipping her coffee near the high arched windows with her chin on the palm of her hand supported by her big forearm.  

     “What on earth are they barking at,” she said aloud. “Something is happening,” she answered herself. Then she too saw it coming down the middle of the avenue. “What in hell is that?”

     It was now the people of Applewhite who ran for the town center. Over fences, across lawns, from vestibules and back doors out into the graveled streets they came with faces flushed and pounding hearts. The unmentionable had come, an intrusion from the outside. After a hasty assembly, they marched toward Bank Street where they assumed the barking was originating. Expecting a lost excursion bus or misdirected weather patrol, they marched with indignation toward Bank Street.

     For a people who can’t tolerate the occasional wanderer entering their village uninvited, that which stood before them was almost impossible to conceive: a great herd of shabby people and ragamuffin children milling about in front of the old bank building. There was Florence Applewhite, skirted by her lawyers, transfixed at an upstairs window, and there was May Parks Reed beneath her, coming to the door of her restaurant, ready for anything.

     The townsfolk stopped short and fell into stillness, not knowing just how to deal with this obscene violation. The dogs, one by one, quit their barking, their job finished. The sky was heavy and thickening above and the air was without movement. A moment passed in weighty silence. Then Cooper moved through the crowd to the bottom of the restaurant steps.  

      “We’re looking for some breakfast,” he said to the proprietress, his voice filling the troublesome space.    
     “A bit late for that,” said May.    
     “Are you open?”  
     After a moment’s hesitation, “I could be.” Followed by, “Can you pay?”  
     “Sure,” said Cooper.    
     “Then you are welcome, come on in,” said May, fully conscious of Florence’s presence above in her office. May had been looking a long time for an opportunity for a hard tweak to Florence’s nose, now she had it.
     “Hold on there,” came a deep voice from the townsfolk, as a large man in bib overalls stepped forward. “We don’t allow beggars in this town, I would suggest you leave the way you came in, and now!”  
     It was Cooper’s turn, “We’re not beggars,” he said in a strong voice, “we’re travelers and we’re looking for a meal, which we will be paying for. We’ll be on our way when we’re finished. We’re not looking for trouble.”

     Ornel was fidgeting by the steps, very uncomfortable at his position in leading the group here.
     “Now look here, you hush-up, Harlan Phelps,” said May to the man in bib overalls. And to the visitors, “I want you to come in here if you want some breakfast.” May gestured them in with her big arms. The travelers moved onto the wide stone steps leading up to the café and May threw open the doors. “They are on my property now, and you, Harlan Phelps, keep your distance!”  
     Harlan was trembling with fury but knew he had lost this round.  
     “All right, May Parks, but when they’re finished we’ll be here and ready to see that they get an escort right out of town.” Then, in a low voice to his lieutenants at his side, “We can show them what trouble is.”  His face was red and his raised hand was shaking as he assembled his force. He had been crossed and humiliated by May.

     May seated her guests, gestured out the window to her helper mingling in the crowd and set about firing up her kitchen again.

     Francine washed up in the ladies room and joined Cooper at a window table, the California hippies occupied a booth, Ornel and Terence sat at the counter. The kids all sat at a large table in the center of the room and the rest filled in. The place was packed and jolly, anticipating a real meal, and May laid on her best. Outside the wind was beginning to move out of a sunless sky.

     When planting conditions change on the land and the fields are left fallow before being sown again, there are undesirable weeds that move in quickly to take advantage of the void and flourish before sustainable growth can be re-established.  Applewhite in its shaky condition presented an opportunity for such weeds, the likes of Harlan Phelps and his friends. They had of late become more visible at town meetings, always demanding an excess of self-serving dictates. Harlan now saw the present situation as a way to make his position unassailable. Despite May’s actions, he was determined not to let the moment pass without asserting his control.    

     Harlan’s slack jowls were directing spittle down his shirt front as his large mouth shouted directions to his minions. “Now look, get on home as fast as you can and get all the weapons you have and bring plenty of rounds and be back here in twenty minutes. We’ll show those buggers.” he said over his shoulder. “Coming in here like they own the place, smelly hippies and trash. They won’t leave here without some regrets, I’ll tell you that.”      
     A crimson faced Harlan jammed his hands into his pockets, lowered his head and strode off.  
     Florence was watching all this from her upstairs window, an insult added to a tragedy, but she could use it to buy herself a little precious time. To the extreme irritation of the tax board, Florence excused herself to “see to things.” She went down the hall to the long disused bathroom. It was lit only by a dirty, wired, glass skylight high overhead, emitting a grey light. The marble counters and checkered floor tiles were blackened in grime. She needed a moment to think. She dusted off an old, oak office chair, sitting improbably in the middle of the bathroom floor, likely last used by her grandfather’s assistant all those years ago. She was in the utter depths of depression. For years her town had been slipping and she had done nothing to save it. She had fed the fears and isolation of her people, she had been passive about people like Harlan Phelps, allowing him to remain rather than kicking him out of town as she should have. She let businesses slip away without fighting for them because she believed that the beauty of the town would be compromised and Applewhite’s loveliness was important above all else.

 
     But now, with Harlan and his supporters, the people were becoming ugly, despite the qualities of their town. Her grandfather would not have believed that this kind of riff raff could have grown out of his beautiful little town. Florence was afraid of the chaos of the new. She had seen many, once lovely, small towns give way to a coarseness unknown in her Grandfather’s day. “People didn’t seem to care about the loveliness of the place anymore. They let soulless uninspired buildings dominate the countryside. They let  rich, black dirt and green pastures get covered with cement and macadam and acres of parking lots, and enormous box stores surrounded by even larger car parks. It is the blight of prosperity. And it does not age well. Plastic doesn’t take on a patina, it just gets chalky and breaks.”

     “No! This will not happen here,” Florence said aloud.  
     “When Grandfather envisioned this town,” she thought, “commerce was small by today’s standards, and it was a part of the life of the town. It was owned and run by its people, and they cared how it worked and appeared. Today things come from far away and there is no one to answer for them. It’s so different now, must it be a choice?”
     Florence leaned back in her chair and the rusty springs wheezed as it tilted.  
     “Now what do I do?” Florence asked her Grandfather. “These homeless wanderers outside and these ugly tax men inside.”  
     “Grandpa,” she cried aloud, “you’re wrong!”  
     “Like a rotting carcass, the buzzards have smelled us,” she thought, “and have circled the town, and are now feeding in my own bank.”
     “That May Parks has waited a long time for this.”  
      “There will be trouble when Harlan Phelps comes back,” she told her Grandfather.  

       Applewhite never had a police department because it was unneeded. Applewhite also shunned the intervention of the State Police. Florence would not call them in now, that would be to give up their precious independence.  

     At that moment there was an awful rolling crash outside. Florence snapped forward in the chair and rushed to the hall window. The van from California was on its side and gasoline was darkening the road. The crowd led by Harlan was pushing the side of the second car, it went over and Harlan threw a lighted match at the gas spill. There was an instant conflagration. The crowd, stunned by its own actions, stepped back, their faces aglow with reflected firelight. The homeless travelers inside May’s Café had come to the top of the steps and to the windows. The flames mounted the sides of the van and climbed up to the half empty gas tank now on its side. Inside the tank the remaining gas boiled, vaporized and exploded in a ball throwing fiery darts of fuel in all directions. The crowd backed away.

     The overturned brown sedan from Ohio, with the boxes on top, had spilled its contents upon the road. The flames spread. The very personal possessions of the homeless woman in the crowd now lay scattered about, giving an embarrassing close-up panorama. A yellow, flowered, summer dress and clean, white panties caught flame. A pair of nylons, twisted into a run on the roadway darkened under the flames, a bundle of letters, a note pad and a pair of red shoes curled in the heat. A box of color photos of laughing children spilled out. The color coalesced to brown then turned ashen. The children played like a gathering of ghosts.

 
     The people of Applewhite set their guns and hoes down on the broken sidewalk and watched the flames in ashamed silence. Harlan had overstepped, and his moment had passed. The homeless watched without a word.

     Overhead, the sky turned into a great, dark shelf of  purple and black, marbleized with thin veins of peach. The midday light had access only from the distant horizon, and this strip of light was narrowing to a sliver. Then, almost over Applewhite, a dark green form developed and from it a white chimney of water with a ropy stem stretched out and slammed to the ground, not a mile from the village, spinning and wreathing like a shot rattlesnake. As soon as the column hit the earth, it turned black with spinning mud. It moved over the countryside spitting out trees and farmsteads.  

      Only the sound of the great thundering howl was able to break the attention of the people of Applewhite who looked up with their mouths agape unprepared to assimilate an even greater event.

     May Parks stood at her front door. “Oh my God, it’s a black roller!”    

     Then from the third floor of the bank building a large four foot square sash window burst out with a crash even louder than the gathering storm. Florence stood at the shattered window with an old office chair in her hands. She was ready to take charge of her town.  

 
     “May, let everyone into the sub-basement through your vault door,” she shouted above the wind. “Harlan get that fire extinguisher out of the restaurant and get those fires out quick, and you,” she turned to her attorneys who had moved to the hall behind her, “get down those stairs as fast as your legs can take you.”

     Lightning filled the sky bringing a shaky luminance to the town. The air snapped and crackled with charges of electrical energy. Necks and arms bristled with hair standing as straight as the needles on a pine bough. Stretched skin prickled tight over bone, mouths dried to parchment. Leaves curled into cylinders, barometers shattered, auto ignitions shorted, electronics flashed out, and compasses spun like tops. Such was the immense gathering force of a black roller coming out over the western plains.

     The furious black column of twisting water, dirt, tree limbs, lumber fragments, leaves, grass, even farm animals, and everything else that could be vacuumed up from the ground moved over the hills in a quivering dance toward the town.

     There were no lights in the sub-basement of the old bank building, May had the only flashlight.
There was no talking, only the sliding of clothing and the slap of shoes on the flagstone floor.
Seats were improvised, some were standing, some leaning against brick walls or columns. The mammoth steel vault door was closed tight and the bolts thrown home. There followed a silence in the vault, the kind of silence found only among a throng of people who are hushed, only punctuated by minute personal sounds and the vast presence outside. Unmeasurable time passed.

     “Are you here, Harlan?” Florence said in a strong voice. Silence. “Are you here, Harlan?”
     “Yea, I’m here,” was the sullen reply from the dark. “Whadyouwant,” he growled.  

     “Harlan,” Florence said in a powerful voice, “I want you to apologize to these people right here and now, and even if none of us comes through this with any more than they have, I want you to make it up to them or get out of town forever. And you will see how it is to fill their shoes, you might learn something.”    
     “Mumm,”said Harlan.
     “What was that?”
     “Yeah, yea,,”mumbled  Harlan.
     “And for the rest of you,” Florence’s voice continued in utter blackness with just as much command. “You should all be completely ashamed, that the proud town of Applewhite could behave in this ugly, evil way makes me blush with shame. What happened outside here now is just what Albert Applewhite built this town to avoid. It was built to be a place of delight to the eye and mind.  To answer to a higher calling, to be a paragon for other people. One hundred years ago, Albert came out here to build a town that was a shining example, and our parents worked hard, hard to keep these values and we have let them wash away like the colors in a cheap dress. Look at us now. May Parks has been the only person in this selfish little village with any love or humility.”

 
     Florence went on in the inky black to tell her people of all their other problems with the tax board and what their bleak future might be.  

     “Now all this may be in vain, we don’t know what will greet us when we open that door.” When she finished there was silence from within the vault. Outside the wind was stripping the last leaf from the noble old trees and the last tile from the lovely cottage roofs.
     “Excuse me, Miss Florence.”
     “Yes, who are you?”
     “My name is Francine Moskowitz and I have had a lot of legal training, especially in real estate law and worked as a paralegal until my husband and I both lost our jobs in Cleveland, Ohio recently. If what you say is true and the town has lost a lot of value over the years, I believe that it could be that you don’t owe the taxes you think you do. It could be that the town of Applewhite might even be entitled to a reimbursement from the county. I’d be more than happy to do what I can to help.”

     There was a palpable unease in the far corner of the basement vault.  
     “Yes, I would very much like to talk to you Mrs. Moskowitz, and the name is Applewhite.”
     Again, a hush from the people of Applewhite while they digested yet another startling set of facts. Slowly it became apparent that there was a stillness outside as well. Two men standing near the iron door threw the rusted handles on the inside, the bolts grated as they withdrew from their matrix and the heavy door rotated on its hinges outward into the gloom.    

***************************************

     Florence Applewhite, as she was still known, was lying in her bed, her face turned to the ceiling as her head pushed its hollow into the crisp pillow. The sweet, warm, prairie air moved softly through the balanced casement windows. Florence was lost in thought. “On this day, five years ago, she rose from this very bed to walk into the jaws of the worst and the best day of her life. Every moment, every gesture, every word was seared into her memory. That strange reedy man, Terence, had stood on the rubble bestrewn bank steps and called out his speech to the assembled in his thin voice, the dirty rain falling from his hatband in opaque rivulets.

     “God gave me that Wheelbarrow, he gave it to me seven years ago, and now he has taken it back. I knew He would when I did not need it anymore.” This,” he said with his arms waving in the air, “was all meant to be. I was sent out seven years ago and He told me to go out in the world and spread my fears and concerns. He brought me to this village to show me that I am not alone. He has a powerful way of doing things. He wanted us to survive, this place to correct its ways. I was His catalyst. He told me. He said I would know the sign when I arrived at the chosen place. I have been traveling ever since. I have pushed my wheelbarrow across the continent many times and found false signs. At first I wasn’t so sure about this, but there is no doubting it now.”

     Terence screwed up his face in a strange little smile. He wiped away the rainwater with his hand across his brow. The people of Applewhite listened with fascination, “I found those travelers out there on the highway, they were sent too, though they didn’t know it.    

     Terence ended his speech as abruptly as it began. Uncomfortable now that the speech was over, he walked down the steps without another word, down the muddy county road and out of town, and disappeared as completely as his wheelbarrow.

     “And he was right. The rest of the travelers were the ones who were wrong, the joke was on them. Florence thought again, if we all weren’t gathered at the bank at the moment the tornado hit there would have been awful death and injury, certainly. Even Harlan Phelps with his evil thoughts was useful in bringing people together at the bank. He and his cronies left soon afterwards. Oh yes, those miserable little tax people had to grant us a very comfortable credit, thanks to Francine.”

     The damage to the town could have been much worse, though it did take all of the five years to complete the repair, and it was done with care. Thank you, Grandfather.”

     Florence reached across the crisp white sheets. “Cooper believes,” she thought, “that for a town or a woman to have real loveliness they must have a measure of inadequacy. Chaos had come to Applewhite, and to me, and he says that both of us have become more lovely for having survived it.”

     “Now, I know Grandpa, you are partly right and partly wrong in believing that beauty can only come with careful control. Chaos blows in the disparate seeds of change, some good, some bad, but they must be planted and mixed into the garden to give the vigor of diversity it needs to grow strong.”

     Twenty homeless people did stay and many sent for their families. Terence went his way, as he must, and a man named John had to travel the road. Francine brought out her family and became the town treasurer. Norman Goldman stopped running and became the town carpenter, the farmers stayed and gave new life to the fields and the rest of them planted their seeds as well.

      “But Grandpa, we did not let the ugliness in, the fields are still green around Applewhite.” Florence turned on her side, oblique to the bed, fitting into Cooper’s bulk. At 9:04 PM the Union Pacific eastbound freight sounded the rise and fall of its call at the Gothenburg crossing seven miles to the south. But Florence was asleep.